www.betterangels911.com
better angels: The Firefighters of 9/11 is 343 individual oil paintings of the New York City firefighters who died on 9/11. Each portrait is painted intimately onto a small burned block of wood. Displayed in seven rows of 49 columns, spanning 21 feet, the individuality of these men speaks directly to the audience. The compelling personality in each face leads viewers to contemplate the individuals, to imagine the lives they lived, the people they loved – while the sheer volume of faces viscerally measures the enormity of the tragedy.
Since June of 2011, this very moving memorial has been touring the country, thanks to my partnership with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, without whose help and support this project would never have come to completion. The NFFF (firehero.org) is a national non-profit organization created by Congress in 1992 with the mandate to honor fallen firefighters and support their families and co-workers in rebuilding their lives after a line-of-duty death. They maintain a memorial on the grounds of their headquarters in Emmitsburg, MD, and host an annual memorial weekend each October to honor firefighters nationwide who died in the line of duty the previous year. They provide a range of support services for survivor families and fire departments, and in 2004 began a program called Everyone Goes Home to reduce line-of-duty deaths nationwide.
When I began better angels, I only knew one firefighter, married to my doctor back in Colorado. This is no longer true. I am honored to now have met hundreds.
In some way, better angels was born on 9/11. Although I had lived in Manhattan for 22 years, I was living in Colorado in 2001, frozen by shock in front of my TV. Around three o’clock that afternoon someone said, “We think that more than 300 firefighters died today,” and that one sentence suddenly brought all the horrors of the day emotionally home for me. They were the ones who ran into the buildings. Twelve days later when The New York Times printed a two-page spread with all 343 pictures, I thought “someday I can do something about this.”
I put that two-page spread in a safe place and my impulse to create something to honor these men on my mental back burner – which is often how I work on ideas. But I never forgot about it. Three years later I suddenly envisioned painting their individual portraits on burned blocks of wood. Over the course of the next six years, the paintings came into being. Initially I painted only 93 portraits, then went in search of a firefighter organization to be a partner. It had become clear this was a bigger project than I could pull off on my own. After the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation signed on with me in the fall of 2009, I proceeded to paint the remaining 250 portraits. The last was finished on Christmas Day 2010.
My best estimate is that 3000 hours were spent over these six years to create the paintings. It took almost 200 hours just to prepare the blocks of wood for painting and for hanging. Although I had begun with the tiny images in The New York Times as reference, 100 paintings in, after partnering with the NFFF, I was given a copy of the FDNY’s 2002 memorial book. These new 2″ x 2″ images gave me much more information: suddenly I could tell if they had light eyes or dark eyes, if it was a mustache or a five o’clock shadow, that there were different insignias on the white hats. I hadn’t even known there were different insignias on firefighters’ hats. When I finished the last hundred paintings, I went back and repainted the first hundred. This was not just due to the better reference photos, but also because I had become a better painter, something I consider as their gift to me.
In the course of touring these paintings and speaking with thousands of people (and hundreds of firefighters), I have learned many things. Many stories have been shared with me about firefighters on the wall. I know nicknames, anecdotes, numbers of children. I know the brothers and cousins and father and son. For some I have learned how high in the buildings they had climbed, or how they managed to get to the site. Because firefighters across the country have shared with me, I better understand the staggering amount of expertise and the devastating professional loss these men represent. Watching families and friends at the wall gives me a glimpse of the personal loss. I have learned that better angels represents 606 children made fatherless.
Slowly, I have also come to realize that I am part of a huge community. Bottom line, better angels was born of the simple desire to create something positive in response to something so terrible. In this, I am but one of literally millions of people who had the same impulse and responded in their own way.
Abraham Lincoln ended his first inaugural address calling for the nation to heal its wounds by appealing to “the better angels of our nature.” For the artist, these 343 firemen represent New York, the FDNY, their selfless profession, and also – in the way of heroes – the possibility that each of us may rise to the “better angels” of our own nature.
www.betterangels911.com
“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Abraham Lincoln, concluding words to first inaugural address March 4, 1861
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